Apprenticeships

Lord Bhattacharyya Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bhattacharyya (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Prosser on securing this important debate. I declare my interest as chairman of WMG at the University of Warwick. At WMG we are partners in Jaguar Land Rover’s Lifelong Learning Academy. I set it up. We have a budget of just under £1 billion. We train workers from across the industry, from advanced apprentices to senior managers. This experience has taught me the importance of updating curriculums and constantly improving the quality of training in classrooms and at work. Vocational learning must be relevant to future careers. Currently, we spend more than £3.5 billion in developing new products. Our competitors are in Germany.

I shall focus on how we can create high-quality apprenticeships. There is broad cross-party agreement on this aim, yet all Governments have struggled to deliver. It is a graveyard of acronyms, from TEC, YOP and YTS to LSC. The challenge we face is practical, not ideological. In Germany, 500,000 young people begin apprenticeships each year, leading to a status that they can take pride in, such as being called technician engineers. Here, apprenticeships have grown mostly among older workers. A decade ago, 80 people aged over 35 began an apprenticeship; last year, 80,000 did so. More than 2,000 people aged over 60 became apprentices. I am a great advocate of lifelong learning, but this is perhaps taking things too far.

Some of these apprenticeships have been of poor quality. In 2012, one supermarket created 50,000 six-month apprenticeships, while their private training provider made more than £12 million profit from these contracts. At the same time, the number of young people on advanced apprenticeships in engineering and manufacturing declined. To their credit, Ministers have learned from their on-the-job training and now argue that apprentices should be new entrants, on quality courses leading to a recognised status. Removing programme-led and short-term apprenticeships was a good start. Now we await the Ofsted report on apprenticeship quality, knowing that the Skills Minister, Nick Boles, has admitted it will expose a great deal of “bad practice”.

How can we fix this? Sir Michael Wilshaw has rightly said that,

“to have a truly effective vocational education system, employers must become more involved in its delivery”.

Today, trailblazer employer groups are setting new apprenticeship standards. However, progress is slow, with only 54 agreed. When new standards are agreed, there will still be much poor training and some bad employers out there. Ofsted is excellent, but its last annual report showed that it inspected just 16 employers and 40 independent learning providers that taught apprentices. It cannot monitor thousands of employers and hundreds of vocations.

In Germany, the dual system relies on the chambers of commerce supervising training, assessing quality, and setting exams. In Britain, there is no such established industrial partnership driving quality. There is no clarity on how standards will be monitored or inspected in the future. We must create the capability in industry to drive up quality in the workplace.

The apprenticeship levy could provide an answer. Levy payers will receive a voucher to buy training; underspend by other levy payers will increase the voucher’s value. We should use a proportion of this pool to also support apprenticeship standards. Employers should create sector funds responsible for updating standards, ensuring vocational training is of high quality, and insisting that students are treated well at work. Ministers are right that the levy must not subsidise firms that do not train; using the levy to support apprenticeship quality would only help firms who do train and apprentices who gain.

We have broad agreement on aims and strategies; now we must get the delivery right. Unless we do that, it will be another two or three years of more reports coming out and we will have no future. I hope the Minister agrees that employers must both contribute to funding apprenticeships and contribute to improving quality.